Earlier this year, I teamed up with Dracolite and Les Ateliers Nemesis to get some very cool armour as well as some zombies to do a creative Game of Throne fan shoot – this time attempting to create an older Arya and Sansa Stark. I’ve always been a fan of Game of Thrones (hence the fan fiction I co-produced/directed earlier this year) and figured – why not keep playing around in George RR Martin‘s amazing universe.
To make this shoot possible, we had some custom armour prepared and designed by Charles Brousseau and Veronique Lortie – some fancy dragon scale armour as well as a beautiful wintery medieval dress.
Trying to stay as close to the series as possible we figured that Arya, re-enacted by Anne T, would have to be armoured and why not in dragon scale armour… complete with a sword ornamented with her the sigil of her house, a dire wolf. As for Sansa, re-enacted by Lisa-Marie, would have to look more feminin in a resplendent blue and gold dress.
Figuring that it would be far more exciting to create battle or storytelling scenes, we got some zombies together and dressed them up in extra furs left over from our Game of Throne fanfiction. The final piece of the puzzle was actually finding a location as well as a dire wolf which we found next to some good friends of mine Didier and Lily respectively.
Hope you enjoy the BST video:
The first two images were created by tossing snow up into the air. Using nothing more than a simple reflector to light up the face of my models and a small speed light in the back on hyper sync so that I could maintain a shallow depth of field without the need of ND filters.
Shot with a Nikon D800E | Nikkor 85mm f/1.4G | ISO 50, 85mm, f/1.8, 1/800
The storytelling shots were a little bit more complex to create.
To begin with, we had a lot more characters to place around and also place Kita, our untrained but heroic malamute in a variety of very specific positions.
I wanted to tell the simple story of Arya and Sansa stumbling upon a group of bodies who then reanimate and culminates in an epic battle scene.
To make the shots possible we had to have our poor models lay down in specific positions for long periods of time as we slowly built and tweaked the scene. Using a trusty bag of flour, we layered the tree and bodies to give it the impression that the entire shot took place in a snowy wonderland. Nothing too fancy, nothing too complicated!
Nikon D800E | 24-70mm f/2.8 | ISO 50, f/7.1, 1/250 Sec
Nikon D800E | 24-70mm f/2.8 | ISO 50, f/8, 1/160 Sec
I think that my favourite shot of the series is hand down the final one. I’ve always found it to be quite fun creating “epic battle scenes” that looked like those found in comic book drawings when characters are impossibly layered and stacked one on top of the other.
To do this we had our characters climb everything from gear boxes to step ladders so that they could get the proper height and by simply adding some red makeup to the neck of the left most zombie… Bam, I had a decapitation! Such a simple solution. I still remember my crew sniggering at me to just do it in photoshop… pshh.
For us, the hardest part was definitely getting Kita to not look like he was having the time of his life. I’m not sure we quite got him “mad” but this was the closest we managed. Would love to have some tips on how to have a growling dog in the future!!
Shot with a Nikon D800E | Nikkor 85mm f/1.4G | ISO 50, 85mm, f/8, 1/160
- MUA: Lisa Marie Charron
- Models: Lisa Marie Charron, Anne T, Anick Morel, Steve Ka Coté, Catherine Carpentier,
- Assistants: Renaud Lafreniere, Sylvain Mailhiot, Adil Boukind, Jeffrey Vincent Malo, Guillermo Castellanos, Didier Deedz Kaade, Lily Kan, Aric Lee, Simon Paradis, Monique Guilbault
- Video: Claudel Desir, Jonathan Golino
- Clothing: Dracolite, Veronique Lortie, Ateliers-Nemesis
Announcements:
Upcoming workshops in Indiana, Mystic, Hong Kong and Singapore… stay updated here- I’ll be contributing to a short film + US road trip in the first two weeks of January… if you want to get involved, please check out this link!
Special Gear used:
- Nikon D800E: B&H | Amazon
- Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8
- Nikkor 85mm f/1.4G
- Pocketwizard Flex TT5 |Pocketwizard AC3
- Pocketwizard AC9 (nikon)
